


And death i think is no parenthesis

by khalee51



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Cyberpunk, Cyberpunk, Drugs, F/F, Faked Suicide, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Medical School, References to Drugs, Suicide, Trans Character
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-08-22
Updated: 2014-08-26
Packaged: 2018-02-14 05:48:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,373
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2180307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/khalee51/pseuds/khalee51
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cyberpunk medical school AU with femslash, yay!  Joan Watson first encounters Sherlock Holmes as a cadaver she's dissecting for med school. Turns out that body is not, in a manner of speaking, Sherlock.  Heavily inspired/influenced by too much William Gibson, a friend who's going to med school come hell or high water, and too much time on the internet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. for life's not a paragraph

**Author's Note:**

> first chapter oh dear god* what am i doing with my life term starts soon and i've never written a thing ever in my sorry weird-haired existence comments and stuff are welcome i don't own the characters moftiss or bbc or ac doyle or somebody does or the cyberpunk universe which i've heavily borrowed from william gibson's neuromancer worldbuilding ok it's 2 am i shouldn't be awake i tried i swear this is why nobody talks to me please nobody read this and judge me but it's the internet we are all represented by bits, shifting voltages in increasingly smaller and cheaper transistors do they really combine and constitute a soul? does information coalesce into an individual? certainly the combination of certain data points and algorithms can pinpoint a person's individuality, but it cannot reconstruct who they are or how they think or what they love--cannot imitate the creation of a living, breathing person who still has the capacity to fuck up this author's note.  
> *[insert deity of your choice, or none at all]  
> chapter and work titles are quotes from e.e. cummings' poetry, more specifically since feeling is first:
> 
> since feeling is first  
> who pays any attention  
> to the syntax of things  
> will never wholly kiss you;
> 
> wholly to be a fool  
> while Spring is in the world
> 
> my blood approves,  
> and kisses are a far better fate  
> than wisdom  
> lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry  
> \--the best gesture of my brain is less than  
> your eyelids' flutter which says
> 
> we are for eachother: then  
> laugh, leaning back in my arms  
> for life's not a paragraph
> 
> And death i think is no parenthesis
> 
> he's one of my favorite poets. y'all should read some of his work if you have time.  
> xoxo and slimy tentacled embraces,  
> khalee51

The moment she laid eyes on the corpse stretched out on the table before her, Joan Watson knew she was the unwilling audience to the epilogue of a tragic story. The man’s lanky limbs possessed a stillness that, judging from his unruly dark hair and long, nicotine-stained fingers, they had rarely known while blood still flowed through them. Smoking…that was a habit everyone knew made no sense. Why would you breathe carcinogens into your lungs—lungs weren’t cheap, either to grow or to buy from backalley biovats in the scummier parts of the city, everyone knew that. What's more, the underworld was _crawling_ with derms and pills and microsofts that brought a far sharper, scintillating buzz that left the antiquated nicotine high stumbling in the dust. There were numerous track marks snaking up his arms, though—perhaps he’d clung to the older ways of seeking an escape for some obscure reason. The only people that smoked now were the ostentatiously rich, who could afford shining new pink lungs (with more alveoli than ever before!) from the doctors who churned out newer, better bits and pieces every few months; and the suicidal, who had bought far too many simstims of tragic heroes and sultry beauties exhaling clouds of their dismay and broken dreams and figured cigarettes were a good way to speed things up without being caught under the Wasted Minds Act. Ever since the government, such as it was, had started sending out armed enforcers awhile ago to beat up the families of suicides asking where they’d uploaded their brains to before they blew them out, then arresting them because Wasted Computational Power Hastens Hegemony, the suicidal have sought exotic ways to slowly rot their brains. Apparently metastasized cancer was preferable to enslavement in government servers, as the former had a certain end, and the latter was, according to whispers on the street, like an exotic cocktail of psychosis, depression, and the desolation of complete loneliness. She checked the jack behind his ear and found the port itself scorched, melted, and twisted beyond repair—self-inflicted, perhaps, to prevent recovery of his mind postmortem, but also standard practice after deaths—cyberspace mythology made concrete in ordinary urban superstition. She wondered if someone loved this man enough to take every possible measure in protection of what some would have called his soul. Whoever they were, they probably knew now that love was no easy means of redemption. The jack’s seals bore myriad scratches and dings beyond the precise damage done to the port itself—signs of microsofts inserted and removed, over and over again, with hands twitching from direct neural stimulation. Her cadaver—she ought to think of him as _hers_ now, as they’d be making an intimate acquaintance over the next few months—had experienced the best highs both the very distant and the very recent past could offer, from the jittery buzz of nicotine and whatever the hell he’d injected to the smooth-as-impossibility serenity of a trip through cyberspace. By some (dubious) definitions, he’d lived a very full life indeed. 

The door to the anatomy lab wooshed open, but she paid it hardly any mind at all, engrossed in her perusal of this cadaver, this _mystery_ , of hers. She was examining his hands, which were astonishingly free of calluses for someone whose family was poor enough to sell his corpse to this medical school, which, she reminded herself with a wry frown, was not terribly reputable, (not that she was complaining) when she felt a gentle tap on her right shoulder. Pivoting nauseatingly fast on her right foot, she grabbed the offending appendage right at the juncture of the meat of the thumb and the palm itself and prepared to bend the forearm back until her assailant begged for mercy. And came face-to-face with Mike Stamford, holding a cup of shitty coffee from the machine down the hall and drawing his eyebrows together, parting his lips, just getting ready to be concerned. She dropped his hand (too fleshy, too soft, to belong to anyone who posed her a real threat) and forced a smile, driving the corners of her mouth into a grin and willing them to _stay, damnit_. Mike, bless the deans for not exclusively admitting shitheads and entitled bastards, held up the coffee in a peace gesture and looked at the tiled white floor for a moment before glancing up and shooting her a self-deprecating grin.  
“Sorry about that. Old habits die hard, I guess?”  
Mike knew some of her past, but certainly not any of the more...colorful aspects. She worried sometimes, as they scarfed down ramen together between lectures, crammed for tests in dimly lit cafés, what he was shrewd enough to infer. So far none of the other students seemed to know where she’d come from, or how she’d been admitted, which was ample reason to trust him, but she could never trust anyone enough to give them her whole story. This was a time to patch holes, not to build up this web of trust between them.  
“Damn. Sorry if I startled you. I know this is medical school, not the nastier parts of Kabul, but some days you can’t tell one shithole full of assholes from the other, know what I mean?”  
And Mike, thankfully, dropped it.  
“Yeah. It’s fucking spooky in here with all these cadavers. No wonder you flipped out. What the hell was I thinking?”  
“Give me that coffee and we’ll be even.”  
Wordlessly, he handed it to her and turned his attention to their very own personal cadaver, for which management had probably bartered a discount on a new lung, or chemo drugs—assurances that, for a time, this man’s family would not go the same way as their unfortunate kinsman.

And goddamn, the man made no sense at all. He definitely came from a rich family—probably rolling in money, if the skill and care taken on the graft scars attaching (no, _reattaching_ ) one of his feet _at the ankle_ (near-impossible to reconstruct with any sort of grace) and the lean, taut musculature remaining in his calves were any indication. This man had had his foot sliced clean off and then gone gallivanting around London afterwards for many months judging by the lack of muscular atrophy. Whoever the fuck his surgeon was, they cost money. At some point, this man’s life and mobility had been worth quite a high price to someone willing and able to pay it. He would’ve been graceful, as if designed by a minimalist bent on maximum functionality, with spare muscles on a long-limbed frame that looked capable of rapid, precise movement. She’d’ve suspected he was a high-end prostitute who’d fallen out of favor with a very powerful, very vengeful patron, but prostitutes didn’t have scars like that. Clinics, cheap ones, hawking plastic surgery were everywhere. The market knew untrammelled, unmarked flesh was attainable, so it didn’t buy used. Anything like the scar round his ankle or its companions crosshatching his thighs, just for starters, wouldn’t get you anywhere.  
“Probably a razor blade. Self-inflicted if I know anything about angles and all those people who come to the clinic after ‘slipping in the shower.’ Stamford interjected. She’s seen them too, terrified enough by the bleeding to come to the only clinic around guaranteed to be staffed by the incompetent (its only virtue is that it’s free) but too afraid to admit the real source of their injury. Fuck the wasted minds act, she thought to herself for not the first time and certainly not the last. Any act of self-injury that might injure a source of computation the government could put to work cracking the Hegemony’s firewalls was considered an act of treason punishable by whatever the local law enforcement sees fit at the moment. As a result, nobody tries to seek help. People just slowly waste away, sometimes die faster and suddenly, and _sometimes_ if they’re lucky a sympathetic doctor will help them out, get them sorted, get the police off their backs with a few well-placed lies. Which is what should’ve happened with this man, if his perfect beautiful fucking impossibility of an ankle is anything to go by. The question, then, was simple. Who failed him? 


	2. who pays any attention to the syntax of things

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> we are introduced to the other half of our dynamic duo

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> as gibson conceived it, a "microsoft" is a program on a chip; you can plug it into a socket in your head to run the program in your brain. they can give you skills or knowledge, like being able to speak Spanish or do Aikido. in this iteration of his universe i have expanded their capabilities pretty extensively.  
> yeah so read it and comment or have feelings or whatever.  
> tentacled embraces,  
> khalee51

Some time before---

She held the microsoft in shaking fingers. State of the art, the Adler woman had promised. It was made, according to her sources, by an artisan somewhere in Hokkaido named Takeda who never left the warren of whirring hard drives and monitors and esoteric medical equipment he called home. She’d had a look at the source code when Adler had plugged it into her handheld, verifying that it wasn’t some mindvirus bought from an upstart Chinese hacker eager to bring down the great Sherlock Holmes. And it was like nothing she’d ever seen in _years_ of whirling through cyberspace at breakneck speed, pursued by ice, the firewall’s ugly but effective stepchild, unfolding, malignant, ready to shred her mind if she hesitated for a second. Intricate subroutines had curled round algorithms tuned for speed like racehorses, the real thing, before genetic engineering had taken hold. She’d _inhaled_ , wondering if this, this near impossibility, balanced like the blind watchmaker’s masterwork, was her miracle drug. Adler, damn her to the various vats her oh-so-perfect parts had no doubt come from, saw her eagerness and quirked rosebud lips into a triumphant smirk.  


“It looks, _Ms_. Holmes, like we have a deal.”  


She’d pocketed the microsoft and taken her leave, coat swishing behind her like the dying breath of some ancient civilization, long misfit legs carrying her, thoughtless but for anticipation, back to her dingy flat above an organ broker. The stale stink of the grow chemicals told her they were growing mostly kidneys right now, probably because the knockoff ‘designer’ stimulants he was selling filled your kidneys with agonizingly sharp stones, little by little, until you were immobile, keening on the ground, begging to die. Life went on, continuing its inexorable march to oblivion.  


Hell, that’s where she could be headed, if she’d played her cards wrong. She’d always had a near-unshakeable belief in her own infallibility, but she’d fucked up enough times to know this newest and best _enterprise_ of hers could land her somewhere very nasty indeed if she’d miscalculated. Cold calculations of risk and benefit and heuristics didn’t take into account the soul-clenching (yes, the great Sherlock Holmes had a soul; she just hid it well) _wrongness_ she felt as she stalked through London, intent on outsmarting yet another corporate AI, head low to avoid cameras, or even now as she sat in her flat, microsoft in hand, waiting for her brain to stop churning.  


She inspected the casing with cool detachment. _Reichenbach_ , it said in firm white handwriting, stark against the carbon black shell of a promise. She savored the word in her tumbling mind. _Reichenbach_. The consonants ground against each other like the gears of a vast steam-driven machine. _Reichenbach_. The precision-welded mechanical promise of _rightness_ , all parts aligned and smooth, thoughtlessly perfect. In her mind, the deliberations muttered, slowed, then _stopped_. It was time. They’d guaranteed, at the very least, oblivion. At the very least, her mind would be irrevocably scrambled and her body, detestable ill-fitting vessel, hidden with the resources only the most insidious shadow organizations could muster. And at best— _rightness_. Beyond the drugs, the pain, the flights to cyberspace. She’d made the risk, and it was good. Let there be light. She reached behind her ear, brushing away unruly curls, and joined salvation with socket. An instant of soul-jarring emptiness and then, oblivion.

Back to a more current past—

Joan finished her inventory of the back muscles. Trapezius, deltoid, superspinatus, rhomboid...the names floated around in her head and, thanks to her enigmatic cadaver, she knew exactly where each one was. Head spinning from the preservatives, she glanced round the anatomy lab, looking for inquisitive eyeballs to meet her questioning stare. Most of the other students had taken their leave once they’d poked through the muscles of the back, the day’s assignment, to the T.A.’s satisfaction, all the while chattering about some sports match, hotly anticipated, later that night. Even under ordinary circumstances she wouldn’t be among them. By some mutual unspoken contract, the flock of shiny up-and-coming doctors from families of doctors didn’t antagonize Joan and Mike and the handful of other outsiders with uncertain pasts and dubious pedigrees. Instead, they barely acknowledged that such a creature could exist in their medical school, their hallowed halls of education. Joan gave no shits. She and Mike stuck together, kept their heads down and, for the most part, buried in books. They couldn’t afford to wander away a dissection before their nasal cavities were steeped in preservatives, they saw scapulae and teres on the retreating backs of their classmates, and they _owned_ the anatomy of the human back like the respectability that someday, by some nauseous inversion of the status quo, could be theirs.

Nobody seemed to be paying attention; for the most part they were cleaning up their benches and scooping up their equipment, eager to be out of this place of death prolonged and examined in agonizing detail. The rest were just as she was, stretching the opportunity afforded her by death and luck and the temporary avulsion of her soul to learn all she could that someday this fate, body laid bare on an indifferent table, would not be hers.  


Mike was gone—clinic shift—and she didn’t envy him, counseling the wretched people desperate enough to come to their clinic, where sometimes during surgery a finger, a kidney, a life went missing without any explanation, probably to the vast junkyard of human parts that fed the illegal organ trade. So for now it was just her and the unaccountable dead man. She flipped him over, using just a fraction of the strength she’d once used to flip men twice her size across her shoulders—but that Joan Watson was gone. There weren’t any implants along his spine, to heighten reflexes or sensation, prevalent in hedonists and adrenaline junkies rich enough to afford the thrill and the risk, and he didn't have the inexplicable dead weight of the reinforced bones typical of vatgrown assassins either. Come to think of it, his looks weren’t bland enough either. Assassins got their faces at strip-mall clinics that took in cheekbones and epicanthic folds and unibrows and churned out anonymous beautiful masks dictated by carefully pruned averages. This man had eyebrows like thunderheads and cheekbones like the mountain ranges created when tectonic plates collided with eons of pent-up rage. If he was a killer for hire, he would have been guided by a high-end AI, probably owned by some nasty corporation with tentacles in everything, to disappear with _that_ face. She checked behind his ears, eyelids, nose for the faint traces of surgical scars, not that she hoped to find anything. Surgeons worth the kind of money this corpse had commanded didn’t leave marks. She flipped open his eyelid—irises were damning evidence, even more so than DNA, which was easily faked nowadays, and blinked a few times. Why the fuck were his eyes so lifelike? She prodded them with a gloved finger—the texture was all wrong, she knew that much from interminable eye dissections and 

**\--desperately jabbing at where she thought eyes were in the dark, twisting out of a bruisingly strong grasp, connecting—screams of pain—and sprinting, running—no direction, just away--**

**\--staring at her, eyes an unnatural black, like the man who always turned into a demon on that old TV show from way back when. He told her his eyes were special, that he could see into her soul, see her heart beating so fast...are you afraid, Joan? Afraid of what I’ll _learn_?--**

Right. Focus, Watson. You’re going to be a fucking doctor. Learn to deal with eyeballs, for chrissakes. You’ve seen worse... _done_ worse... _not good_. 

She looked up at the ceiling, cracking her neck under cold fluorescent lights. Focus, Watson. Back down to her enigmatic pair of not-eyeballs. She’d heard of such a thing, microcircuitry mixed with cells grown from esoteric bibliographies of DNA to create eyeballs, _vision_ , that was to human sight like simstim was to braille. You needed some sort of special permission to get them. Sometimes that came from the government, or from someone in the government your network bribed with unthinkable incentive—salvation, life, always a newer, better deal—to fake it. Who the hell needed that kind of augmentation? Was it just to augment the thrill, boost his other highs to cut out dull, staticky reality entirely, or was this man sharper than reality, slicing through it with his long, powerful stride? Joan’s curiosity tugged at her. She needed to reconstruct this man, resurrect him in the haunted corners of her mind. With his glowing aquamarine eyes, standing strong on his exquisitely repaired ankle, proof that he was a survivor, he could push back the darkness for her. 

God knows she was having trouble holding it back on her own. Couldn’t speak to Mike, or anyone, if she was brutally honest with herself. She’d never bothered to renew old connections when she limped off that jump back into London, never mind forging new ones. The closest she got to confidences were late-night chats over day-old bread with her neighbor Ella. Ella was real big on feelings, always asking Joan why she woke up screaming from nightmares, damn the thin walls, but Joan didn’t see the point. Sure, people like her fought, bled, died, and then relived it every bloody night, but why the fuck should anyone else share in it? They didn’t need to know, wouldn’t understand, wouldn’t really care. This man, though—she thought he’d seen the seething darkness, seen it calling him home. She knew he owed him nothing beyond the dignity bestowed in the careful line of an incision, but she knew he could be her teacher if she listened. She’d learn more as she dissected, delving deeper into the literal body of her mystery, of course, but there were a limited number of reasons for a rich man’s corpse to end up pickled in a medical school anatomy lab. She intended to figure out which one had landed her this exquisite cadaver, pulling back the layers of darkness that had relentlessly consumed him until finally, _something_ besides the location of the fucking _deltoid_ made sense to her. 

Gently, reverently, she wrapped her cadaver, her cause, in surgical drapes and placed him in the stasis locker with his comrades in arms. Her notes went haphazardly into her rucksack; she shrugged on her coat, wincing a little as she burrowed her shoulders into the unfamiliar landscape of secondhand clothing, and strode out the doors of the anatomy lab.


	3. a disappearing poet of always

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> joan does some informational excavation and is unsurprisingly surprised.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'll add more to this chapter but just want to have something up to guilt me into finishing it up  
> why is writing things so hard  
> why  
> why  
> why  
> reading things is so fast even when i'm sleepy or chronically bad at life  
> but words are hard to find and plots are hard to make and how  
> just how  
> ok since i'm bad at life this will be a brief interlude

**an interlude**   
**in which digging commences and then i derped**

The bell tinkled, a simple acoustic stimulus out of place in the soup of mechanical shouts and sussurations that permeated the street. Joan stepped through the door, pausing to push down the dull ache rising in her shoulder. Wrenching open the ill-balanced door had hurt more than she’d like to admit, bone grinding against tendon with a searing, aching intimacy. She blinked a few times, unable to make out much but hulking shapes surrounding her as her eyes adjusted to the paucity of available light. Trout liked his shop dark and cluttered, claimed it lent a womb-like atmosphere that lulled the unaware into a false sense of security.  
“Well, if it isn’t Joan Watson. Not dead after all...what through the odds, and all that.”  
Her head snapped, almost of its own accord, to about three o’clock, where Trout slouched almost out of sight at a table piled high with obsolete tech. Looked like he’d been gutting the old units for the valuable parts. Appropriate—Trout was a scavenger to the core, feeding on the lifeblood of the dead, dying, and desperate. He’d almost been the death of a young Joan Watson, frantic to excise the albatross round her neck that was her family. She’d had dreams and fears, and he’d spun them into possibilities and contingencies, her sitting in a beat-up chair out of some jumpship that probably crashed umpteen times before it found its way to Trout’s hole in the wall, and him behind another table, another pile of junk. Another time. No use remembering how she got back here, she reminded herself, while the jagged slow burn in her shoulder told her snidely that she’d never quite forget, would she?  
And therein lay the rub. The things Trout _fixed_ didn’t pass into mental oblivion lightly. Many times the way Trout aimed to change your life left you in a state of altered existence or, in plainer speak, dead. If her cadaver had come to the school through less-than-legal proceedings, Trout had probably had a grubby long-fingered hand in fixing it. She’d paid him a pretty price for his silence long ago, the knowledge that he was pliantly corruptible gnawing at her gut until she acquired bigger, more immediately fatal worries. Now she’d find out just how far that pliancy went.  
“Speaking of odd...”

(to be continued)


	4. a strange thing and a known thing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Joan digs and finds information of a sort.  
> The plot thickens.  
> Like if you add cornstarch to a stew.  
> Like that.  
> bubble bubble toil and trouble and all that

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> gah does anyone read these?  
> so i made a chapter awhile ago  
> then i gave up on this chapter  
> here is a new chapter  
> it has words in it  
> lots of words  
> words  
> words are nice  
> my words have meaning  
> at least some of them do if you parse them well  
> i don't know why trout.  
> rainbow trout.  
> fish fish fish fish fish  
> fish fish fish trout fish fish fish  
> salmon herring fish  
> that was a haiku  
> i think i might have broken my brain  
> ok bye

Trout inclined his head and narrowed his eyes, hungry as always for information.  
“Do tell, m’dear.”  
“I’m not your dear anything, Trout. When you sent me out on that little errand, I learned how to kill people. And I killed lots of people.”  
“Is that what you’re here about? Killed someone and don’t know what to do?”  
Joan knew Trout had connections to the sketchier elements of London, but she didn’t know how deep they went. With that casual suggestion, her nasty suspicions this was the right place to get rid of the prematurely and inauspiciously deceased were confirmed.  
“Actually, turned up a dead guy who stinks of money busy stinking up a place he shouldn’t be.”  
“Someone you know? I could help you...how do you say...avenge him if you ask nicely.”  
“Nobody I know. Just curious.”  
“Curiosity. I trade in curiosities. If you show me yours...I’ll show you mine.”  
Trout traded in information. Positively wallowed in the stuff. She knew he wouldn’t tell her anything he knew of her cadaver’s past unless she fed him something compelling of her own. Problem was, her secrets were like one of those intricate towers of playing cards she and Harry used to build on days the smog made it downright carcinogenic to go outside. Yank one card out and the whole thing came fluttering to the floor, bits and pieces scattered everywhere. Once she’d found the queen of clubs under their antique screen weeks after one of those days. _Entropy’s a bitch, Watson, and it only gets messier._  
“I know where Magnussen keeps his data.”  
Choose something many people could know.  
 _If it can’t definitively be traced back to you, who would suspect a doctor?_ You need to know this, Watson.  
Patchy eyebrows jumped like cockroaches escaping a boot.  
“Shoot,” said Trout, gesturing magnanimously.  
“Right. A cadaver was delivered to my med school, Barty’s, about a week ago, tall skinny bastard with curly black hair, cybernetic eyeballs, ankle reattached by a surgeon who probably costs more than all the beating hearts on this block put together...they fried his socket before they dumped him.”  
Silence.  
Trout twitched, an involuntary inward jerk of the shoulders, almost as if he were preparing for a fatal blow. He blanched, face the color of sun on smog.  
Then, just as quickly, he squared his shoulders, tugged the corners of his lips into something resembling a smile, and faced her.  
“Sorry, Joan. Haven’t seen anyone like that here. You sure you saw what you think you saw? Picklers at Barty’s probably all junkies of one kind or another.”  
She hated being lied to. _Needed_ to know at this point. Mysteries had never suited Joan Watson. She stepped over broken VR helmets, crunching capacitors and transistors and god knows what else underfoot as she advanced on Trout’s desk. Give him credit for bravery or smite him for idiocy as you like, the man didn’t unpaste his grin right until she grabbed his wrist and yanked, years of rage at this man for cutting her the raw deal he had fueling her already considerable strength.  
“The fuck, bitch?”  
“Tell me, Trout. You railroaded me once. Won’t happen again.”  
“He’ll _skin_ me, Joan!”  
“Good. You'll be prettier then. And we’re getting somewhere. Who’s _he_?”  
She increased the pressure. Not quite enough to dislocate the shoulder, and she’d heard pain derms now were quite effective besides. Trout was visibly sweating now, eyes wide and eyebrows pinched with shock and fear.  
“M—Moriarty helped him do it! But he-he killed hisself! Goddamnit, let me go! I’m not gonna lie to anyone crazy enough to break my shoulder!”  
“Who’s the corpse?”  
He was silent, biting down on his lip as if to keep the words in. She pushed harder. Something cracked.  
“Sherlock. Sherlock Holmes.”  
“What sort of a name is that? Do not lie to me, Trout. You did that once, and if you do again you won’t breathe again.”  
She’d seen men babbling in agony more than enough before, but seeing one who’d lied and sent her into a war zone at desperate, naïve 17 begging her to let him go was certainly novel.  
“I’m sorry...so sorry...you were such a pretty girl, so scared...I wanted to help you, I swear I did...such a pretty girl...now you’re angry and I’m sorry... _he_ needed you...Moran...one of Moriarty’s best....he’ll kill you, kill me...I’m going to die, aren’t I? Joan, please...”  
She dropped his arm, disgusted, and marched out of the dimly lit shop and into the harsh, unforgiving day. The bell tinkled behind her—

**A longer time ago**

The bell tinkled behind her as she stood in the doorway, hands sweating in her pockets full of the cash she’d been squirreling away for months now. She craned her head briefly, looking for her answer, then _act like you belong here, Watson_ strode into the maze of anonymous electronic junk.  
“Lost, sweetheart?”  
She started, arms coming up in front of her chest in a futile gesture—she’d seen an old crone on the street do almost the same when the anarchists who frequented her neighborhood now wandered by. On the grimy floor, dusty with metal shavings and...was that congealed ramen there? sat a greasy-haired man, all scabby elbows and knobby shoulders. He grinned, crooked yellow teeth like monoliths pointing up at the Joan Watson constellation.  
“I...are you Trout? Where can I find him? I need—“  
“The likes of you looking for the likes of me? I’m flattered, missy. What could a sweet young thing want from here, I wonder.”  
“I need to disappear. Quickly. I can pay.”  
“How much? Credit can be traced...it’ll take more than you think.”  
“I have cash.”  
“My, my...we _are_ prepared, aren’t we?”  
“I’m better at this than I look.”  
“Oh, we’ll see about that, honey. Let’s see what you’ve got.”  
She dug in her pockets, feeling the crumbs in the corners from yesterday’s sandwich. Trout shuffled the bills and coins in his solder-burnt hands.  
“This is a nice little stash you have there. You trading derms? Hooking? Who with?”  
“I...help people. Unofficially.”  
“But you still need a fixer.”  
Truth be told, all she did was sew up the idiots who lived near her when they got stabbed fighting over some whore or stealing software from the wrong dealer. They paid her well for her skills and her discretion, and sometimes they dropped hints about the main features of their lifestyle. Trout came highly recommended, in a sense—several of her clients had mumbled his name to her as they bled on her sofa, explaining the deals that had gotten their physical beings so torn up.  
“Yes. I can’t make myself disappear. Know someone who can?”  
“For this price...yeah...I might know a guy.”  
She waited, fists clenching in her pockets. Shoulders hunched. Determined to outwait him, she stared at a space right above his head as he focused on a circuit board in his lap.  
He looked up finally, after an eternity of fumbling and muttering.  
“Still here?”  
 _God, he’s a bastard_. She nodded, mute with terror and anticipation.  
“Guess you’ve got guts. Or maybe you’re just desperate.”  
“Places to be.”  
“What’s this about? Daddy cut off your allowance? Mommy won’t let you fuck Romeo?”  
“Bit worse, actually. Don’t see that you need to know.”  
“D’you need to go far? Because I know a guy who needs people to help him out...he’d be willing to hide you awhile.”  
“What sort of guy?”  
Right then, Joan didn’t know what was worse: working for a pimp or death by corporate machinations. Hosaka was out to get Daddy, although maybe that was his fault for selling data to his mistress. They dealt with problems subtly, as did most of the major corps. Subtlety, to them, meant genetically engineered ninjas slitting Mum’s throat with exquisite politeness in back alleys as Daddy watched, perfectly tailored addictions dragging Harry into numbness, Daddy’s suicide delicately engineered collateral damage. She remembered coming home to his mottled blue corpse—bastard didn’t even leave a note—and _at least whoring’s more temporary than death, and I’ll make a prettier corpse that way_ made her choice.  
“Deals in errands, mostly. Bit of a high-risk job, so make sure disappearing is worth it—“  
“It is. Who’s the guy?”  
“Sebastian Moran. He’s at Yorick’s Saturdays. Tell him Trout sent you and you’re desperate to disappear. He’ll help a kid out.”

**Joan’s flat. Current worldine.**

Joan shrugged off her coat. _Damn, how did I survive til now?_ She’d been fatally naive as a kid; luck had gotten her pretty damn far. Hopefully her luck would hold enough to keep that Moriarty character—or worse, Sherlock Holmes’ rich-as-Croesus family—off her ass. _Disappearing_ again would probably wreck her soul, her body, or possibly both simultaneously. _Keep your head down, Watson. Dead bloke’s not worth your sanity._ Right. Food would make this all a bit less nasty. She padded on sock feet (wool socks were a ridiculous luxury now that most meat was vat-grown, but she’d grown accustomed to them because they went well with combat boots.) to the fridge. Leftover Chinese again. She inhaled the bouquet of MSG and mutant vatgrown orange chicken. Could be worse. As she set the container on her scratched, suspiciously stained table, she paused. She hadn’t left a microsoft on the table before she’d dashed out the door for work this morning; she barely ever jacked into cyberspace, leaving it for Daddy’s ghost. There it sat, though, sleek and black, sucking in the paucity of light in her kitchen. Gingerly she picked it up, holding it like she’d seen one of her TAs holding a particularly troublesome tumor. It was a perfect black carapace, no seams or solders visible. The only identifying mark was a strange German word handwritten on the case in impersonal white. What the hell was a _Reichenbach?_ And, perhaps more importantly, who the hell had gotten into her apartment? She’d had biometric locks installed on the door the day she moved in—paranoia dies even harder than old habits, turns out—it transcends the habit category, thanks very much. Whoever was out to get her, they were _good_. It was something out of a ghost story—charming young woman finds mysterious chip. We all know what happens then—she gets too curious, too innocent to stay alive, and jacks in. Next thing you know, she’s twitching on the floor, then... _nothing_. Joan Watson wasn't stupid like that. Sure, she was stupid in lots of different ways...but not like this. Never took risks just for the sake of knowing she can get away with it. So she put the second mystery of the day somewhere safe, ate her chicken in some shaky facsimile of calm, and fell into an uneasy sleep full of tossing and turning. She dreamt of Trout and shooting and Reichenbach. 


End file.
